The last time he received a bag of groceries from his neighborhood committee was five days ago. “That food is now gone, but I still have my own supply of cookies and chips,” says a man over the phone from Shanghai. “Vegetables have no more.” He does not dare to give his name; he fears that he will be arrested for spreading false rumours.
The eastern half of Shanghai went into lockdown on March 28. That would last until April 1, after which the western half of the city of 25 million inhabitants would follow. But things turned out differently: the entire city remained in lockdown, and no one knows how long it will last.
“I heard that from May 1 they will release the city little by little, and that everything should be open again by mid-May,” says the man. In principle, a metropolis like Shanghai should be able to control the spread of the disease in 10 to 14 days, wrote Wu Zunyou, a leading epidemiologist on social media. But it seems to him in Shanghai the question is whether that will really work.
rotten food
There is no shortage of food in and around Shanghai, there is mainly a logistical problem. How do you get perishables like vegetables to all those 25 million people who are locked up on time? There are stories on the internet of food being thrown away because it rots before it reaches the front doors.
Ordering food online, much more common in China than in the Netherlands, is extra difficult now that many deliverers are in lockdown themselves. What will and will not come is very unpredictable. Someone wrote on Twitter that he could no longer get vegetables, but that a luxurious birthday cake was delivered very quickly.
The lockdown in Shanghai is also different from many previous lockdowns elsewhere in China: in addition, someone was often allowed outside every day or every few days to get food. Now that is not allowed: Omikron is considered too contagious for that. The Shanghai city government has pledged to improve the delivery of food and other essential goods.
Do not hesitate and do not hesitate, and strengthen the sense of urgency and responsibility
Sun Chunlan deputy prime minister of china
There is another logistical problem besides the food. People who test positive – and there were more than 20,000 on Friday – must all be isolated according to strict Chinese rules. But it is not possible to have so many extra beds ready every day, even if the city converts so many exhibition spaces into infirmaries. There are also not enough ambulances to transport all those people to the shelter. Surrounding cities like Hangzhou shelter people from Shanghai in isolation.
Zero covid
There is increasing doubt whether it will all really help. The message from Beijing remains that the number of infections must in any case be returned to zero, the ‘zerocovid policy’. “Stick to the ‘dynamic zero’ policy, do not hesitate and do not hesitate, and reinforce the sense of urgency and responsibility,” Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan said during her visit to the city early this month.
But the Chinese medium Caixin recently stated that the approach with strict lockdowns no longer fits the new Omikron variant. It is both more contagious and less deadly. The traditional Chinese approach thus becomes “fighting a new enemy with obsolete weapons”. that’s what the medium said†
Caixin cites Zhang Wenhong, a renowned infectious disease specialist in Shanghai. Zhang does not believe in an overly rigorous deployment of lockdowns. He also believes that mass testing is much less useful than it used to be, precisely because the disease spreads so quickly and easily.
Between the time people are tested and they hear the results of that test, they can still be infected and have infected others. This makes testing a battle against the beer quay.
Campaign against sparrows
Hong Kong, which had long planned to test all of its more than 7 million citizens in a semi-lockdown, eventually dropped out, probably because the administration recognized the hopelessness of such an undertaking. But drawing that conclusion is politically impossible in China: the Party in Beijing won’t allow it.
Still, the man in Shanghai sees that the weapons are being refined somewhat. “We only test once every three days on the street, the other days I do a self-test,” he says. “I have to pass on the results in an app.”
If he does get tested on the street, things will be different. “We used to gather in large groups. Now they ring the bell and you have to go downstairs immediately. It’s your turn right away and you don’t see anyone else.” And the people conducting the tests don clean gloves after each test.
His first concern now is the food. “There is a rumor that the military will take over the distribution, and there will be no private delivery soon,” he says. That would not necessarily be ideal for him, because he has found another way to food.
Read also Heavy corona wave in China, is ‘zero-covid’ still sustainable?
“We have an app group with people who live in the same building, and we manage to stock up together if we order directly from the producers themselves.” This concerns rice, instant noodles and frozen Chinese ravioli. “Getting luxury things is impossible, and now we just drink water from the tap,” he says.
On social media, the campaign to eradicate corona has already been compared to Mao’s mass campaign in 1958 to exterminate all sparrows in the country, which he said would threaten the grain harvest. Then the entire population had to continuously bang on pans to make the sparrows fly up until they fell dead from fatigue on the ground. China also eventually had to learn to live with the sparrows.